Julianna Conn sat at a wooden table upstairs in Wilton's Coffee Barn coffee shop Thursday morning, whizzing around her iPad and making phone calls for work.

Conn, who lives in Westport, spends about three hours at Coffee Barn every day, taking care of work tasks between dropping off her daughter and picking her up at school.

"It's very convenient, especially for moms like me who have their children in school. Instead of driving all the way back home, which may take 40 minutes of your time at least, you can just pop up at a coffee shop and work nearby the school," said Conn, who works in the information technology field.

Conn isn't the only person who works somewhere other than an office to make her life more convenient. Nationally, about one in 15 workers perform their jobs from home, but in southwestern Connecticut, the rate is a bit lower, with roughly one in 20 employees working from home, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.

The popularity of working from home varies by town across the region: In Wilton, 13.8 percent of workers reported working from their home -- the second highest in the state, behind Lyme, where 15.7 percent of workers spend their work weeks in a home office -- while Seymour and Bridgeport have the smallest percentage of home-based workers in the area, at 1.4 percent each.

Cities and towns are sprinkled in between, like Greenwich, where 7.1 percent of workers are home-based, Newtown, where 6.1 percent are home-based and Stamford and Norwalk, each with 3.9 percent.

Working from home, which can provide employees with greater flexibility, has been a hot topic in recent weeks, since Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced she planned to call back all her telecommuters in favor of office- and face-time.

But working from home and telecommuting are not exactly the same thing.

"There's workplace flexibility: Someone who is usually in the office or part-time in the office, but can work from home when it makes sense -- when they need intense concentration or there are no meetings," Risman said. "Then there's telecommuting when you live thousands of miles away from your office and you're telecommuting instead, using tools like Skype."

That's the case for Westport resident Todd Peters, an advertising director for a Colorado-based company who rents office space in downtown Stamford to conduct his daily business. For Peters, it makes more sense to be close to clients than it does to be close to colleagues.

"We need to be front and center to all our clients all the time, and you can't serve all the clients in North America from one office," he said.

He makes the journey to Colorado about once a month or so to meet with human resources or departments that are hard to communicate with over long distances. "It's more just like catching up with people in the company and then the other stuff is for idea-generation, lunch, drinks, that kind of stuff."

But Risman said the third, and most-often used, kind of telecommuting is a simple tethering to technology.

"Often, telecommuting is, in addition to the 40 hours at the office, it's the ability to come home at 5 o'clock, but then always be tied in by your computer, iPad or cellphone. And therefore, it's simply extending the workday with technology," she said.

The amount of data in existence about telecommuting is small. While the census tracks the number of employees who work at least one day a week from home on the national level -- 12.4 million -- there are no local figures. There are, however, local numbers about the number and percentage of workers who work from home full-time.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey, issued last year, 21 percent of employed persons did some or all of their work at home on days they worked, while 85 percent did some or all of their work at their workplace. The survey also found that more highly educated workers are more likely to telecommute; while 36 percent of workers over age 25 who hold a bachelor's degree or higher did some work at home on a typical day, only 11 percent of workers without a high school diploma did so.

A paper published in the Monthly Labor Review last summer found that where telecommuting has become commonplace, it "is not helpful is reducing work-family conflicts."

According to Glass' research, two-thirds of work hours spent telecommuting take place after employees have already hit the 40-hour mark of their work week.

"Maybe some people had one day a week at home, and they were also working from home on other days as well. We had a combination of scenarios, but the most common was, `I put in 40 hours, and I put in more from home,' " she said.

"If the choice is 12 hours at the office or eight hours at the office and four at home, I'm sure a lot of those workers would rather work at home," said Glass, who emphasized that she is not against telecommuting. She telecommutes herself on occasion; on Monday when she spoke with Hearst Connecticut Media Group, she called in from a coffee shop.

While telecommuting that allows employees to be flexible with their work location can be a positive point for working families, Risman said the after-hours telecommuting can be problematic.

"The parent or partner is never really present because they're always in cyberspace," she said.

But for the live-alone young professional, working from a home-office can be ideal.

Freelance writer Adam Bernard, 34, said this week that he can't imagine working anywhere other than the home office he created in the second bedroom of his condominium in Fairfield, a town where 2,046 people work from home, making it the town with the third-largest number of home-based workers in the state, behind Stamford and New Haven.

"Once you do this long enough, it's like I created a monster," he said.

His setup allows him to begin his workday answering emails at 7:30 a.m. before cranking out interviews and stories, taking a 90-minute gym break in the late morning -- "I need to make sure I see human life at least once a day," he joked -- and getting back to the office for more interviews and writing.

"Sure, there's the pain and the joy of the laptop in the home office. Even though at like seven-ish I might not be in the office anymore, the laptop is still sitting right there. I'll bring it into the living room, so I'm still checking emails. The laptop is open almost all the time," he said.

Even with the possibility of pinging for hours in the evening, Bernard said he would be hard-pressed to give up his seven-step commute in the morning.

"I've interviewed for editorial positions with publications, and I always think, `I wonder how much it would take for me to work in an office again?' For the right position, I'd be willing to do it, and I guess the right price. But it does weigh on your mind a bit when you think, `My commute is seven steps, and you'd be making my commute an hour and a half.' What makes it worth that?" he asked. "I'd prefer this."